Great Names in History

Can you picture Napoleon Bonaparte giggling?
Caulaincourt says he started joking while they were riding incognito through enemy country in a rickety sleigh and nearly freezing.

Who was Caulaincourt?
Napoleon’s Master of the Horse. Caulaincourt’s book, With Napoleon in Russia, is one of the best things you can ever read about the Emperor. Caulaincourt made notes of their conversations and you hear Napoleon’s very words.

What were they doing in that rickety sleigh?

Napoleon was hurrying back to Paris after (actually, during) the destruction of his army in Russia.
They tried to pass as an official and his aide. Caulaincourt was the official, Napoleon, his aide. Of course they hoped no one would ever ask or become suspicious. At the beginning of this trip, while still in Russia, they had a few guards with them, but now, on the last dangerous leg through Prussia, they are virtually alone.

Boney (as the British soldiers used to call him) starts wondering aloud what will happen if they are recognized and arrested. For a moment the style of the book, their conversation in those very scary circumstances, almost reminds you, as it grows funny, of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. “Do you have our guns ready, Caulaincourt?” asks the Emperor.
“They´re right here, Sire.”
“What´s the idea? We blow the brains out of anybody who sticks his head into our sleigh, huh?”
“That’s it.”
Then they talk about the possibility of anyone knowing of their presence in Prussia (very unlikely) and of a plot to kill or capture them.
“Do you know what they´ll do if they don´t just shoot us right here?” says Napoleon. “They´ll take us to Berlin and organize a big trial. Or make the French pay ransom for us—millions of napoleons.”
“You won´t get off that easy,” says Caulaincourt, always more negative than the Emperor. “I figure they´ll turn us over to the English. They´d love to have Your Majesty in their Tower.”
“They´ll put us on a ship and haul us to London in a cage, is what they´ll do,” says Boney, beginning to imagine it. And he starts to see the funny side. “They´ll put you, Caulaincourt, in a cage and show you off to the London merchants. I can just see you all full of honey and covered with flies in that cage. How would you like that? ”

By the end of this they are both giggling like kids and Caulaincourt says to the reader: “I never saw the Emperor in such good spirits, so human, so funny. His gaiety was so infectious that it was some time before we could speak a word without finding some fresh source of amusement. And I can´t tell you what joy it gave me to see the great man laughing at this moment of supreme danger and nearly unbearable cold.”

Later their sleigh breaks down and they have to stop just anywhere to get it fixed. The Emperor imagines that the postmaster recognizes him and will call the police. The German stablehands go so slowly, seem to drag their feet. “Must be something wrong,” Boney tells the brave Caulaincourt, who reassures his liege that nothing is going to happen.

When it´s all over and they´re back on the snow, whizzing along, Napoleon, relieved, starts again with the fun. “There for awhile I thought the jig was up,” he says. “I told myself: this is act one of the cage story. Caulaincourt had better start learning to growl like a bear.” And he starts giggling all over again.

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The Carthaginians were right: it took time to train sailors and oarsmen and Rome didn’t have time. But that wasn’t the first problem Rome ever had. Rome had been having problems for five hundred years. They believed problems could all be solved with a little thought and a little trial and error. This one was chickenfeed. “While the ships are being built, take the men out on that field and teach them rowing,” ordered the general.

“On the ground, sir?”

“Sure.”

“But we don’t have any oars, sir.”

The general didn’t like that kind of objection—one with such an obvious solution. “What is an oar? An oar is a long pole. Get a bunch of long poles—what’s the difference?”

“Yes, sir.”

Soon the fields were full of men sitting in rows of five, pushing and pulling on long poles. A pacer pounded on a drum to give them the rhythm.

As soon as the ships were in the water—in only sixty days, if you can believe Polybius—, the oarsmen went aboard, hopped onto their benches, and started rowing with real oars. There was no time to lose. They rowed right out to meet the Carthaginian ships.

What about tactics? The Romans had never thought about what sailors did out there on the sea when enemy ships met. They didn’t know or care about fleet tactics and ramming. Their objective, once they came up to an enemy, was to jump on his ship and kill him. There was nothing like the good old sword and shield.

Most oarsmen on those Carthaginian ships weren’t used to hand-to-hand combat. They thought their job was done once their ship had rammed the enemy ship. A few troops on the deck above them took care of the surrender and reduced any of the enemy sailors that resisted.

The oarsmen on the new Roman quinqueremes were all experienced soldiers. They saw themselves not as sailors but as soldiers doing the temporary but necessary duty of marching over the sea to meet the enemy—marching in a strange way: marching by sitting still and rowing: but marching.

“I’ve been wondering how we’re going to board their ships when we get out there?” one of the more imaginative Roman oarsmen asked the others on their way out to meet the enemy.

It’s true: try to jump from one ship to another, even on a calm sea, even without the confusion of battle and arrows and stones flying through the air. The two ships, even with their gunwales side-by-side, don’t go up and down on the waves at the same time; and when you try to jump, the harder you push with your feet to lift yourself off, the farther down you go into your own boat. And the ships don’t stay together for long either.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” somebody said. And they did. It wasn’t a bridge but a gangplank.

Now came the kind of practical solution to a problem the Romans were famous for. It wasn’t really an invention. The Romans never invented much. It wasn’t some genius’s brainstorm. And it didn’t occur out of the blue. It came to several men at once probably, because their experience in combat brought them all to the same conclusion. “What we need is some kind of gangplank to carry on our ships,” said the generals. “One we can throw across their deck as soon as we bang up against them. Then our men can run right onto their ship.” A portable gangway was nothing novel. A lot of ships must have carried them and still do. But how do you heave such a heavy thing onto the enemy’s deck from your side, without help? The answer was the “Crow”.

Reader: Thank God.

The Romans built a nice long gangplank, four feet by thirty-six, with wooden guardrails. They cut a slot in it at one end and stuck a long pole through the slot. The pole they stood up on deck and fixed solidly like a mast. At the top of the pole they attached a pulley and ran a rope through it down to the other end of the gangplank. By means of that rope they could raise and lower the gangplank. It swiveled around easily because of the loose slot at the base of the pole or mast.

“That is fine as a way of getting our men across,” said the general after he was shown one of these experimental gangplanks. “The hitch I see is that the enemy isn’t going to let the thing lie there on their deck. They’re going to keep pushing it off. We need a way of keeping it in place and also of locking those two boats together. Why don’t you put a big spike on the end of the gangway? When we lower it, the weight will drive the spike right through their deck.”

Soon all the Roman ships were equipped with one of these gangplanks. They were stood up more or less vertically until they were needed. The enemy saw them and at first didn’t know what they were for. Nor did they care. They knew that the Romans were lousy sailors and all you had to do was ram their ships or drive them aground. Even to the Romans the gangways looked odd. They looked like a big bird—the spike was its beak. They started calling them “crows”. “Get the old crow [corvus in Latin] ready,” the captain would shout as they headed for an enemy quinquereme .

The crow was set up near the bow of the Roman ship and it could be swung around left, right, or forward, depending on the point of contact. It fell with a heavy slam and stapled the two ships together very firmly. As soon as it was down the Roman sailor-soldiers ran across: the first two holding up their shields to protect the men coming behind them. They took every ship they could board. The result was that soon the Carthaginians got very leery of Roman ships with crows and wouldn’t go near them. Their old ramming tactic was obsolete.

Return to The Crow:or the First Punic War (Part 1)

The Crow: or the First Punic War (Part 2)

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It wasn’t the Carthaginians that seized Messana. It was a bunch of silly mercenaries.

Messana is in Sicily. And just down the island is the city of Syracuse, which was an old Greek colony run by a king or what the Greeks called a tyrant.
Not long after the Romans had eliminated their last enemy on the peninsula, a band of mercenaries who had been working for that tyrant of Syracuse got the bright idea to take Messana on their own, for themselves. They massacred a lot of people and set themselves up in the citadel. The tyrant immediately tried to get Messana free and laid siege. The mercenaries, who hadn’t planned too far ahead, now realized they couldn’t hold out and called for help. Some called to Rome and some called to Carthage.

Both Rome and Carthage showed up with forces; Carthage, because it didn’t want Rome in Sicily; and Rome, because it didn’t want Carthage to grab any more of Sicily than it already had, which was about half. Carthage already ruled Africa and the best part of Spain and all the islands in the Sardinian and Tyrrhenian Seas. If they got hold of Messana they would soon take the rest of the island. And once they had Sicily, they would strangle Rome. They could close the whole Mediterranean to Roman shipping.

At one moment there were three armies parked out in front of Messana. Seeing the trouble that was ahead, the Syracusan tyrant decided to let the giants slug it out and took his troops home. That left Carthage and Rome facing each other. That is how the First Punic War began. The fight was about Sicily.

The First Roman Fleet

The first thing a Roman commander always did was to get his troops off the water as fast as he could. He was helpless against those Carthaginian ships, which came on with great speed and rammed a Roman transport and sank it with all its soldiers. The Romans didn’t have a single warship. They didn’t even know how to build one. They had never paid attention to ships. A ship was just a floating container, wasn’t it?
But now if they were going to fight Carthage they needed warships. “So let’s build a fleet of warships and go out there and get those bastards.”

“This fact illustrates better than any other the extraordinary spirit and audacity of the Romans,” says Polybius, the Greek historian who went to see Rome just after the wars with Carthage. “It was not a question of having adequate resources for the enterprise, for they had in fact none whatsoever, nor had they ever given a thought to the sea before this. But once they had conceived the idea they embarked on it so boldly that without waiting to gain any experience in naval warfare they immediately engaged the Carthaginians, who had for generations enjoyed an unchallenged supremacy at sea.”

How do you make a warship? “See if you can’t get hold of one of those Carthaginian quinqueremes,” the Roman consuls told their engineers, “and discover how the darned things are constructed.”

What is a quinquereme? Warships couldn’t depend on the wind so they had oarsmen to make them go. The bigger the ship and the faster you wanted it to go, the more oarsmen. Carthaginian ships liked to ram an enemy; so they needed a lot of oarsmen to get up speed. And they were outfitted with a brass beak just under water-level to pierce the enemy hulls. Quinqueremes had long rows of oars with five [quinque=five] men to an oar. This gave them the strong motor they needed.

Lucky Rome. One day a Carthaginian quinquereme ran aground while trying to sink a Roman transport and the Roman soldiers captured it and called their engineers to come and study it. Now they had a model. Right away they set about building one hundred quinqueremes on this model.

Next problem: Rome was going to have a fleet of quinqueremes but where would it get all the sailors to row them?
The Carthaginians heard about Rome’s shipbuilding fantasies and scoffed.
“In the first place,” they said, “we’d be awfully surprised if their ships were as good as ours. And even if they were, it isn’t ships that make a fleet, but sailors. We’ve been sailors all our lives and for generations. You don’t become a sailor overnight. And what about oarsmen? Do they think they can learn to row a quinquereme in a month or two? It’s going to be fun to see that fleet of theirs on parade—we can hardly wait.”

Reader: I don’t think I can wait either. I have been waiting too long for the crow and there is no crow. I started to read this post because of your title and now I feel tricked.

Thank you for staying. The crow will appear in Part Three. When you see it you will be glad you held out through the history lesson.

Reader: I wonder.

See: The Crow: or the First Punic War (Part 3)

What if you are a great army but your enemy is a great navy?

You know how to march with fine discipline over hill and dale. You pitch a dandy camp, a real fortress with high walls and a ditch, that nobody is fool enough to attack. On the field, man to man, with your spear, your sword and your shield, you can beat any enemy that is brave enough to stand up to you. But your enemy is out there on the sea, floating on big ships, and just laughing at your predicament. You don’t have any warships, only a few barges and ferries. You can’t go out there and get him—you don’t even know how to swim.

That happened to Rome. The enemy out there calling him a landlubber was Carthage; and if anybody was a sailor, it was a Carthaginian. Those fellows had been sailing around the Mediterranean for hundreds of years. They had even been brave enough to push on past the Pillars of Hercules into an unknown ocean, and south down the coast of Africa. They loved the mist and the smell of the salt-sea . At night when they lay down on the rolling deck, they felt as cosy as the Roman soldier in his square camp and pup-tent. They looked up at the same sky, though the Carthaginian liked to imagine the old heroes and figures he saw in the constellations, and the Roman wondered how he could organize that mess of stars a little.

Rome had been fighting its neighbors for five hundred years and chasing them around the peninsula. Rome was busy with the Gauls, the Etruscans, the Latins, the Sabines, the Samnites, and the occasional Greek. She worked her way south on the Boot and finally came to its toe. When the soldiers lifted their heads after the last battle, they saw the sea. No more Italy, no more neighbors to fight—they had conquered them all. They saw the sea and of course those grinning Carthaginian ships.

They knew Carthage controlled the Mediterranean but up till then they didn’t care about the Mediterranean. “You stay out of my hair and I’ll stay out of yours,” the Romans had told the Carthaginians, who signed a treaty or two with them about staying out of waters where Carthage had no intention of going anyway. “When we feel like it, we’ll go anywhere we want to,” the Carthaginians said to themselves, even while they signed the treaties and shook hands with those rude Romans who didn’t seem to understand the world.

The Romans weren’t sailors but they had always done some trade along the coast with the Greek colonies in the sole and the heel of their Boot and with Greece itself. Roman ships were barely sea-worthy—just barges and transport vessels like wooden boxes; but they were good enough to haul the goods as long as they watched for storms and hugged the coast and went slowly. The boats left Ostia, the port nearest Rome, sailed down the west side of the Boot, slipped between the toe and Sicily, which it kicks, and then headed east for the heel, Tarentum, or right on to Greece. And back.

That route, if it can be called a route, was the one Rome had taken for centuries. It was a very low-profile route: no one had ever tried to block it. Rome knew there was one very vulnerable point—just the place somebody COULD cause trouble if he wanted to. That was Messana—or rather, the Straits of Messana—the narrow sea between the tip of the Boot and Sicily. Block that and all trade would stop. No ship would get by. Life in Rome could get hard if the Straits were blocked for long. Every time the Romans looked out to sea and saw those cocky Carthaginian ships jumping up and down, they worried a little. “If we ever get into war with Carthage and Carthage blocks those straits, we’re going to have big trouble,” they warned each other. “What kind of sacrifices do you make to Pluto? Have to check up on those.” They knew what to do to make Mars happy; but, to be honest, they had neglected Pluto, who was the sea-god.

Reader: Where is the crow? I keep waiting for the crow to appear.

The crow will appear in a minute. First you need background. You saw that the Straits of Messana were the Achilles’ Toe of the Boot of Italy, if you will; and that the worst thing that could happen to Rome was a war with Carthage, who controlled the seas. Guess what is going to happen.

See The Crow (Part Two)

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(This monster is not by Leonardo but by Michelangelo)

One day Leonardo da Vinci’s dad knocked on his door. “Haven’t you finished that shield yet? The guy’s been waiting for it for over two months?”

Leonardo called from deep inside his room. “Just a minute!” Not even his dad had ever entered. It was a wizard’s workshop and contained secrets. “All right! Come in.”

“Ugh!” said his dad, wincing as he walked in. “Stinks like the devil in here. Don’t you smell…..?”

And then he let go a howl of fear. “What is THAT?” His eyes were fixed on a strange monster wriggling in a corner of the room. It looked like no animal on earth—in fact, it looked like a dragon.

“Fine,” said Leonardo, who had been watching his father’s reaction. He walked over to the monster, picked it up, and handed it to his dad. “You can take it now—I see that it works,” he told him.
It was a monster he had painted on the buckler, snarling and threatening, looking so real his father had been frightened. “Incredible!” his dad said, beginning to smile. “How did you make it?”

Leonardo opened the shutters of the only window in the room and let light fill the room. There on his work-table were the bodies and parts of bodies of a dozen animals. “I make my own monsters,” Leonardo explained. “I took the scales from this carp and the wings and teeth from this huge bat and the crest from this rooster and I glued them onto the body of the lizard here. I thought he needed a longer tail too, so I used this snake. When he was all assembled and propped up, I painted him on the shield. Before you came in here I set it up in the half-light to see if you would think it was real, and you did, so I’m satisfied. I hope your friend who ordered the buckler will like it.”

Leonardo was sorry his dragon wasn’t really alive, of course. One day a caretaker working in the Medici gardens found an enormous and strange-looking lizard and brought it to him. “This reminds me of one of your painted dragons,” he told him.
It reminded Leonardo too, and he started thinking how he could spruce up this real dragon a bit–improve on nature. First he made some wings for it, covered them with real scales, and glued them on its back. When the lizard moved the wings wagged. Then he gave the dragon a beard and horns and bigger eyes. He kept it in a box and “used to show it to his friends and frighten the life out of them,” says Vasari, his first biographer.

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In old Rome buildings collapsed all the time.  They were too tall for their base and the walls were too thin.  Hear that distant rumble?  That’s another rickety building going down somewhere in the City.

According to a census of buildings made at the time of Septimius Severus the usual city block (insula) was around 300 square meters—hardly broad enough to carry a structure twenty meters high, which was a typical height by then—three or four stories of shaky construction.   Greedy builders found ways of thinning the walls by adding rows of bricks to strengthen the concrete or the adobe; and they kept pushing skyward.

The poet Juvenal lived in a tipsy third-floor apartment but he had neighbors who had to climb higher to reach home. “Who at cool Praeneste, or at Volsinii amid its leafy hills,” he whined,” was ever afraid of his house tumbling down?….But here we inhabit a city propped up for the most part by slats: for that is how the landlord patches up the crack in the old wall, asking the boarders to sleep peacefully under the ruin that hangs above their heads.”

Augustus was so alarmed by the frequent collapse of buildings that he issued an edict forbidding private citizens to construct an edifice higher than twenty meters.  But buildings kept growing tall and keeling over.  A hundred year later Trajan in desperation tried reducing the legal height to eighteen meters but he could not buck the greedy builders or the need for more housing.

By the fourth century Rome was world-famous for her tall buildings—many were five and six stories high.

And one skyscraper towered above them all: the legendary INSULA OF FECULA. That monstrosity was an apartment building so tall that it became a  tourist attraction, like Trajan’s Column and the Pantheon.  No one knows just how tall it was or how it met its end.  Maybe a storming Visigoth toppled it with a swat of his sword.

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I was puzzled by what the old Greek historian Herodotus wrote on the construction of the Great Pyramid.

He visited Egypt in about 450 BC and talked with the old priests there and heard their account of the construction of the pyramids. That was at least a thousand years after Pharoah Cheops had built his pyramid but it is the oldest account that has come down to us and has to be taken pretty seriously. Those stones weighed about two and a half tons and were transported for miles after they were quarried, by barge and then over land. How?

The Great Pyramid didn’t look then like it does now. It wasn’t a pile of steps but a perfect geometrical pyramid that shone in the sun. It was polished. After the big building blocks were set up as we see them today, they were covered with a layer of flat slabs and polished till they shone.
Herodotus had known that. What he hadn’t known, and what surprised him, was what he learned about the road the Egyptian engineers had built for hauling the stones to the construction site. IT TOO WAS POLISHED!

“For ten years the people were afflicted in making the road whereon the stones were dragged, the making of which road was to my thinking a task only a little lighter than the building of the pyramid, for the road is five furlongs long and ten fathoms broad, and raised at its highest to a height of eight fathoms, and it is all of stone polished and carved with figures. Those ten years went to the making of this road and of the underground chambers of the hill the pyramids stand on….” (Herodotus, pp. 425-426 Loeb Classical Library, translated by A.D.Godley)

Now, I had seen how men moved blocks in a stoneyard and I assumed that the Egyptians had done the same: that they hadn’t dragged those big blocks of theirs but used rollers and planks. The problem I saw was the rollers. Probably, though not surely, the huge stones would have crushed wooden rollers or logs. And I wasn’t even sure if bronze rollers could take that weight without being flattened. Later I learned that the Bronze Age hadn’t yet begun at the time of the building—that only copper instruments were used—so I had to throw out the idea of metal rollers altogether.

Then I read Herodotus and got the surprise, the same as he had. Why had they polished the road to the pyramid? It couldn’t be that they dragged the stones over that polished avenue—that they polished thousands of square feet of pavement with the aim of smoothing the dragging of the blocks—to reduce friction. Anyone, at any stage of human inventions, can see that to reduce friction you have to get the stone OFF the ground, not polish the ground. And if they used rollers of some kind and planks, the smooth surface of the road would actually hinder the hauling. You wouldn’t want the planks on the ground to slide around but stay put while the stone rolled over them. And how could the poor slaves and oxen that pulled the stones get a firm foothold on that slippery road?

But Herodotus seems not to have thought of the problem. What awed him was the vastness of the project and the results. Perhaps he took for granted what I discovered later while reading a modern study of the pyramids: that the Egyptians, like the people who carried the boulders to Stonehenge, must have hauled their stones ON SLEDS. That is how they reduced the drag and pulled their stones down that polished avenue. Only the tracks of the sleds were in contact with the pavement and its smoothness did make the pulling easier.

Yet then wasn’t the polish unnecessary? Wasn’t it still an impediment to the pulling? The men and oxen would slide all over the place unless they worked off the polished road, to one side of the stone. They would pull a little left and right of the block, the way mules used to pull barges on canals from the paths along the banks. But the road—ten “fathoms” wide—was no dinky canal or creek, so pulling from its shoulder or berm would have meant doing so at a great angle, thus losing effectiveness.

I re-read my Herodotus and found the solution:
“Cheops compelled all the Egyptians to work for him, appointing to some to drag the stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountains to the Nile: and the stones being carried across the river in boats, others were charged to receive and drag them to the mountains called Lybian.” Ibid., p.425

I realized that the polished road leading up to the Great Pyramid was only the last bit of work, the last “mile”. The real feat was bringing—dragging—those blocks up and down the mountains, where the roads were surely not polished or even paved. If the workmen were able to perform that feat, using sleds or any other means, they had solved the problem of transporting big stones. Without polishing their roads until they were slippery.

Conclusion: the broad avenue leading up to the Great Pyramid was polished after the blocks were hauled through on sleds, just as they had been hauled for hundreds of miles on other, worse roads. The polish Herodotus saw on that road had nothing to do with reducing friction: it was there as part of the vast general design and meant to dazzle.

See Egyptologist Mark Lehner’s theory that the great blocks were quarried not in the mountains but right at the foot of the Pyramid.

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Getting around in Roman times was hard.

Few had a riding animal. Travel meant walking. Everywhere there were processions of men and women, groups of three or more, trudging along with a knapsack and a walking stick, just as the pilgrims still do on their way to Santiago in Spain.

Shoes were bad. Most people wore rope or leather sandals with rope soles. It must have been usual to see a tired traveller adjusting the straps of his sandals, loosening them or removing his sandals to rub his feet.

The roads were terrible. Most were only wide paths, muddy or hard and bumpy with wagon tracks. There were few inns, so travellers often had to spend the night outdoors. Travelling alone or with just one companion was dangerous because of highwaymen, so if you could you joined up with a group of travellers going your way.

A few rich men had horses or mules to ride. Though there were saddles and bridles, there were no stirrups, so riders had to mount by jumping up and dismount by sliding down. At many post stations there were platforms with steps for the women and the elderly.
There were no horseshoes yet either—at least nothing was nailed to the horse’s hooves. Animals with injured feet were shoed with metal sandals called soleae but healthy horses wore no protection.
Stirrups and nailed horseshoes were not invented until the Middle Ages.

Travelling by horse-drawn cart was much faster but very uncomfortable. The big box carrying the passengers sat right over the wheels—there were no springs or leather straps or suspension of any kind, so every unevenness in the road was transmitted directly to the seats above, which were mere benches. Passengers were constantly jolted and tossed left and right, as well as up and down. Sleep was impossible except after exhaustion.
The dust and dirt the horses raised came into the cabin and soon covered everyone. Carriage windows were only square holes—glass panes hadn’t yet been invented. Consequently the wind and rain blew in unless the shutter was closed, in which case the carriage was totally dark. People who were sensitive to draft or dampness suffered very much in a carriage.

The horses or mules that pulled the carriages had the harness straps around their necks, which choked them a little or a lot, depending on the weight of the load they had to pull. The U-shaped collar, which transferred the thrust to the horse’s shoulders and off his his neck and throat, wasn’t invented until the twelfth century. When it was, the animals could pull much greater loads without tiring.

(A Roman carriage. Notice how the horses pull from their neck)

A trip from Rome to Cadiz in southern Spain took two or two and a half months, though Julius Caesar, riding in a coach and using the efficient army network of roads and mansiones (places for the military to rest and change horses) once made the trip in 28 days. They say he wrote much of his Gallic Wars in carriages on his way to army camps. Caesar didn’t waste time.

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It was the middle of March, 85 BC—the Ides, in fact. The whole family turned up at the not-very-big house in the Subura district—hardly an aristocratic one. Julius, still in his toga praetexta, his boy’s toga, went to meet them one by one at the door as they arrived. It was his big day: the day he would become a Roman citizen and put on the toga virilis. He kept adjusting his toga and brushing his hair with his hands. He was handsome and had spent time at the mirror studying what he thought were penetrating glances. But then while he spoke to the guests and followed a thought, he forgot about how he looked.

His family collecting in the atrium were old Roman patricians except for Uncle Marius. Uncle Marius had been a plough-boy. He was a short man with big hands and a peasant’s loud way of talking. Now he was retired but seven-times he had been consul. He had saved Rome at least twice. He had defeated the proud African king Jugurtha in battle and brought him to Rome in chains; he had reformed the army in time to save the Republic from a massive barbarian invasion of Teutons and Cimbri in the north. Marius was insensitive to the fineries Caesar was used to; but Caesar was able to overcome his distaste for Marius’ manners while they talked and to learn from him. And Marius was able to overcome his distaste for Caesar’s foppish manners because he saw that the boy had a mind.

Marius was married to Caesar’s Aunt Julia. Julia and her sister Aurelia, Caesar’s mother, were the kind of educated, intelligent women Rome was famous for. They were from noble old families and ones in which the girls received the same instruction as the boys and joined in the talk on every subject from war and politics to literature and art. They were married to the best men their dad could find. For Aurelia he managed a match with the Julius family—one of the oldest patrician gentilitates in Italy. And for her sister he won a marriage with Marius, now champion of the popular faction and one of the most influential men in Rome.
When they saw each other the two women hugged with tears in their eyes. They were always elegantly dressed but today their ornatrices had been particularly punctilious. “My God you look beautiful,” Julia told her younger sister. “Anyone would say you are Julius’ sister.”

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Who was the last to see Alexander, the greatest man of ancient times?
The Emperor Augustus, according to the Roman biographer Suetonius.
But how could that be? Augustus lived three hundred years later.

This way:
Augustus was in Egypt. He had just won the last battle, Accio, in his war against Mark Anthony and had chased and caught up with him in Alexandria. Cornered, Anthony told Augustus: “I think we could come to an understanding.”
“I don’t,” said Augustus. And he told Anthony to make his exit like a good Roman.

Anthony’s lover Cleopatra knew that Augustus wanted her very badly too. As yet another lover? No; as the star in chains of the triumph parade he was planning for Rome. So she decided to avoid that humiliation by making her exit like a good Cleopatra: with a snake—the famous asp. Augustus discovered her still warm and called in specialists to try to extract the poison and save her. But they were too late.

While he was in Alexandria, putting things in order, making Egypt into a better supplier of grain for Rome, the locals asked him if he’d like to see Alexander the Great.
This is how Suetonius puts it:

“…having placed before him the sarcophagus and the body of Alexander the Great, which was taken out of its tomb, [Augustus] honored him with a golden crown which he placed on his head and covered him with flowers….” (Suetonius, Life of Augustus, chapter XVIII)

“Do you want to see Ptolomeo, too?” the Egyptians asked. “We can show you him.”
“That’s enough,” said Augustus “I came to Egypt to see a king, not the dead.”

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